Median score is not what's being discussed. It's quality vs score. Those individual comments that are of completely average quality and yet have phenomenal scores are the most telling.
Also very telling: score velocity over time. For example, if `joe` makes a good point with factual grounding and is getting lots of points. Then `bob` replies in disagreement and bob provides almost nothing to back up his position. Then suddenly the points reverse (joe goes negative and bob gets lots of points) just because bob said it it must be true and everyone blindly agreed. There are ways to measure this impulse response that would provide more concrete numerical measurements.
Median score... there are so many effects that would cause this to not relate to comment quality that that is pretty useless. For example, just commenting on more active topics can give you a much better median score.
The principal effect of karma here is not how it helps you judge your fit, but how it actively shapes the community/content. This effect was clearly visible on reddit as it was realized that the more sensational content was vastly more promoted in the reddit karma system.
So my question:
What is the value of high quality content ordering? Are the present ordering strategies on HN/reddit/[insert karma-based discovery site] good enough? Would the theoretically perfect ordering offer much more value than current systems?
A lot (majority even?) of factories/universities do have generators which they operate at most expensive hours and feed the excess back into the grid. It only makes sense to have these on hand from a risk perspective considering the volatility of electricity costs.
[insert jealousy for company with no business model]
[troll complete]